Today we are testing the new Areca 1880ix-12 RAID controller. This is Areca' premier SATA 3 internal RAID offering and signifies a great leap forward for a company known to cater to the enthusiast crowd. With the speed and power of SSDs reinventing mainstream storage, RAID card manufacturers have been under tremendous pressure to deliver a product that can handle the massive throughput and high random reads of SSD's combined into ultra speedy RAID arrays.Previous generation RAID cards have been a trying venture for manufacturers as they have been unable to scale well in arrays, making the cards themselves a pointless endeavor. Ripping apart Arecas new flagship line of controllers here though, we think you will be amazed at the numbers we have pulled up for the 1880ix-12.

TRENDnet’s TEW-687GA 450Mbps Wireless N Gaming Adapter is a sleek and versatile piece of network equipment. While it is primarily marketed toward gamers who want wireless N performance on their PC or consoles, the TEW-687GA can also double as a bridge for your network, provide N connectivity to media players, or any other device with an Ethernet port. This ‘gaming adapter’ successfully interfaces with all of these devices while providing great performance compared to the competition.

Not everyone can afford to have the most powerful computer with multiple 26" monitors, or maybe you have realised that you don't need a $500 video card to play your favorite game. For those of you that can relate to my previous statement there is the ASUS ENGTS450 DirectCU OC Video Card, it comes armed with a overclocked GPU running at 850MHz and slightly overclocked memory frequency of 950MHz (3.8GHz effective). It looks good, it does the job, but you won't be able to turn on all the fancy settings of your favorite game while playing at a high resolution. What's more important is that this is quite possibly the coolest video card I have had on my table, I'm talking 57°C at full load with the fan spinning at 30%. Benchmark Reviews aims to provide you with an unbiased review of the ASUS GeForce GTS 450 DirectCU OC and report back our findings, keeping you informed on the latest technologies available on the market today.

Around here, we usually see motherboards from the like of ASUS, Gigabyte and MSI. Even EVGA makes an appearance every now and then but there is one other company which is trying to break into this market once again: Sapphire. With their new Pure Black X58, they hope to once again make an entry into enthusiast circles but is this board too little, too late? We’re going to find out.

The Thermaltake V9 BlacX Gaming Case is sleek black inside and out, and comes loaded with features you would expect from a top of the line case. More than that, the Thermaltake V9 BlacX also packs in a Dual Bay HDD Docking Station right on the top of the case that is SATA III capable and easily fits 2.5" and 3.5" drives with no adapters necessary. Thermaltake first made a name for themselves with innovative top of the line cooling products, and the V9 BlacX holds true to that tradition.

A little over a year ago Zahn put the Corsair Hydro H50 Liquid CPU Cooler through the paces and awarded it our Silver Seal of Approval based on its performance, price and installation procedure. Corsair has since followed up on the original design with the release of the H70 which we will be taking a look at here today. The H70 features a lower profile water block / pump assembly, a thicker radiator and dual cooling fans, among other changes. These improvements sound great in theory but will they translate to real-world performance?

P67 Motherboard RoundupOCC has published a review on a P67 Motherboard Roundup

The overclocking on the Pro gives you many options as to how you would like to go about it. There are software based options, BIOS based automatic options and manual BIOS options to choose from. We chose the manual BIOS based option to fine tune the overclock for our tests. The i7 2600K in the ASUS Pro overclocked with relative ease to a mind bending 4.951 Ghz clock speed with a controllable heat output. The vcore voltage was elevated to 1.48v in the BIOS and the core temperatures never exceeded the low 60's during the testing. This is quite remarkable seeing as how the last generation of Intel processors were known for their enormous heat output that required high-end cooling solutions when overclocking, not even to their maximum potential.

Let's dive into GIGABYTE's P67A-UD4. This is the "little brother" to the UD7 that we have already told you about. The P67A-UD4 is sort of a scaled back version of the UD7. You get dual x8 SLI and Crossfire and lose a few other features on top of that. Of course, it is not marketed to the same high-end crowd as the UD7, so it does not need the same feature set. But even without Three-Way SLI the UD4 is still a member of the Ultra Durable line and has a great feature set of its own.

Like its big brother, the UD7, the P67A-UD4 is a nice looking board. GIGABYTE has made a good move (in my opinion) with the new black PCB and stylized cooling. The layout is also very clean with good component and peripheral spacing. As there is no NF200 on the board, the cooling is broken into two parts; the voltage regulators and the Cougar Point MCP that everyone is talking so much about.

Gone are the days of monochromatic screens, polyphonic ring tones and battery lives measured in days not hours! As smart phones have developed (particularly since the introduction of the iPhone) screens have become larger, brighter and higher in resolution, connectivity is "always on" and multimedia (be it music, movies or photos) is a minimum requirement. All this technology is wonderful but it has had a detrimental impact on battery life. Try as they might with the latest polymer battery technology, manufacturers are squeezing more features in to smaller physical forms and something has to give. Recharging your phone is now as much a part of the daily routine as cleaning your teeth or styling your hair. Forget to charge your phone and its only a matter of hours before the phone shuts down and you miss that important business call or Justin Bieber's latest tweet on Twitter (OMFG!!).But fear not, because Choiix (a subdivision of CoolerMaster specialising in "digital mobile devices accessories") have a device that will allow you to top up your phone battery on the move - the Choiix Power Fort 5.5W.

The average computer nowadays has about two USB ports and some audio ports. To be honest this is nowhere near enough with the growing amount of input devices a typical computer user has, such as digital cameras, MP3 players and webcams. Today we are reviewing the Master Panel II from Vizo; a product that will make connecting your devices to the PC, much easier. Let's see how it does in the review...

HIS HD6990 Dual CrossfireX ReviewKitGuru posted a review on the HIS HD6990 Dual CrossfireX

AMD launched the HD6990 today, and KitGuru was at hand to analyse the reference board. We know that discerning readers of KitGuru will want to see how two of these video cards perform in a Dual CrossFireX configuration. We will be putting two HD6990â€²s through their paces across single screen, and four screen configurations and comparing them against many of the mainstream boards available on the market today.

Zotac's Geforce GTX 570 does prove that is a direct competitor with any reference based HD 6970 at this given time. Through benchmarking and testing, both videocards won and lost during certain benchmarks and in the end, I can't and will not say one is better than the other. Regardless, Zotac's reference based version of the GTX 570 proved to be a great videocard and proved to work flawlessly right out of the box. The only hindrance would have to be the reference cooler which doesn't seem to be up to the task if you would like to overclock AND keeps things quiet and cool.

TRENDnet’s TEW-687GA 450Mbps Wireless N Gaming Adapter is a sleek and versatile piece of network equipment. While it is primarily marketed toward gamers who want wireless N performance on their PC or consoles, the TEW-687GA can also double as a bridge for your network, provide N connectivity to media players, or any other device with an Ethernet port. This ‘gaming adapter’ successfully interfaces with all of these devices while providing great performance compared to the competition.